This is where I heal my hurts
Rachael Williams, AKA Ambient Babestation Meltdown, explains why she can't untangle misogyny and racism in music. She also shares her love for Burmese food
One of the people that makes Twitter bearable for me is Neville Southall. The former Everton and Wales goalkeeper totally confounded my expectations by showing solidarity with sex workers, trans people and those with mental health issues. And, instead of promoting various sponsorship deals like many ex-pros, he spends his time online calling out race hate and homophobia. I also found it particularly inspiring when he gave his Twitter account to several sex workers for 24 hours as it not only gave these marginalised people a voice but it provided them with access to a group — football fans — who usually misunderstand their plight or show convenient disinterest in them.
Today’s newsletter isn’t exactly a takeover — my voice is still front and centre in the usual interview feature format — but I want to tell the life story of Rachael Williams, a rare woman and person of colour working as a DJ and club booker. She also used to be on the staff for Television X — interviewing the channel’s sex workers — so she’s well placed to talk about discrimination in the music and porn industries.
Mine and Rachael’s voices aren’t as disparate as you might think since we had similar upbringings: it’s rare to find a fellow British-Asian who has so much relatable experience. We both have mothers that only expressed love through food and the only non-English words we know are culinary. Although Rachael grew up in the 1990s in the Wiltshire market town of Malmesbury (it even has a Somerfield like in Hot Fuzz, she tells me) and despite my home market town, Dunstable, not being picturesque at all, we both had families who normalized racism.
Rachael, like me, is a product of empire so describing her ethnicity is difficult and problematic — the only true immigrants in this narrative are the East India Company who came to Asia and displaced our ancestors — but she tells me her parents (and grandparents and great-grandparents) were mixed race, Anglo-Indians and/or Anglo-Burmese. I’m calling her British-Asian or Brown for this piece because that’s what we find simplest.
I think it’s important to call out culture when it’s problematic but I’m not interested in this cancel-culture false narrative. All the issues Rachael talks about are systemic and none can be solved quickly or by buying into token diversity. And if you want a clip that shows how bad DJing is in terms of race, check out French DJ David Guetta’s ‘tribute’ to George Floyd. (Not even going to link to that bullshit)
“Having been embedded in the porn industry,” Rachael says. “You see it from all sides and you see it from the inside. Every industry is exploitative and there’s good people and bad people. I saw directors who were really respectful but there were some people who were sleazy and awful. And I see that in music because there’s a lot of crossover between porn and music.
“In porn there are girls who have a lot more control of their careers than you would think. There were people who were just way into drugs and you get that in music as well. If we’re talking about porn being exploitative we should talk about music as well. One has clothes, one doesn’t!”
Rachael worked at Television X during the years before and shortly after Channel 5 became part of Richard Desmond’s media group in 2011 when the two disparate broadcasters were lumped together in Docklands. She interviewed the channel’s models in a blog pretending to be a laddish character under the pseudonym TVX Mole who appeared to be given behind the scenes access to the girls. She would interview the women in their dressing rooms, take notes and then write up the copy. (If pornography is like music, then it does also sound similar at times to journalism.)
People she met at parties wouldn’t believe that TVX Mole was actually a woman because she managed to strike the fine balance of “being pervy but not too pervy”. She also was employed to promote the channel online when the likes of Twitter were nascent platforms and well before social media marketing became a degree course.
After this she became ‘embedded’ in another misogynistic industry: DJing.
For this she adopted a persona called Ambient Babestation Meltdown which began as a live performance pastiche of the adult TV adverts she once supplied the voiceovers for during her time at Television X.
I was really happy to meet Rachael at London Bridge for this piece because it was so refreshing to chat in person. Not only because I’m fed up with more than a year of Zoom and phone call conversations but, despite having never met before, she handed me a Burmese condiment called balachaung.
I suspect balachaung might be something similar to belacan which was a key ingredient to a lot of Malay dishes my mother used to make, like fried chicken. Many malay dishes are versions of Chinese, Indian or Thai cooking, I’ve never properly researched it other than cookbooks, but they feel like colonial dishes that were cooked for the British and then slightly adapted to appear more authentic.
(Rendang may be the only exception as it originated from West Sumatra, in Indonesia and is a slow cooked curry that would have displeased a Western eye. Whatever its origins, the Roti King in Euston will sell you a beef rendang similar to my mother’s and you will become addicted. There’s no curry like it).
But balachaung has a lot more ingredients than the main shrimp paste base of belacan and contains tonnes of fried onions, garlic and shrimp powder. After our meeting, I cooked the whole jar Rachael gave me in this recipe for a chicken and lime juice curry (it surprisingly had a tomato rather than coconut milk base). It’s chicken off the bone which hints, again, at colonial cooking as British people in the past never took to curries with bones in (that makes the broth super rich, you crazy white supremacists!).
The curry was amazing and it felt like I’d discovered a totally new genre of spicy dish as it opened my palette up to a different combination of Asian flavourings and led me to want to discover more Burmese recipes. Although I used the entire jar like a curry paste in the recipe, balachaung is in fact intended as a table top condiment.
As Charmain Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook says: “When you sit down to this kind of meal there is no guarantee that yours will taste exactly like the next person’s. In fact, it’s highly unlikely. You will help yourself to the same dishes, but from there on it becomes a no-holds-barred improvisation.”
It’s no surprise that Rachael admits after our interview that she misses the communal nature of Burmese cooking which leads her to fashion big feasts for her friends. It’s also, I sense, a bittersweet ritual for her because, like me when I cook Malay food, it reminds her of a mother who struggled to express love outside of the kitchen.
“My mum experienced a lot of really awful racism,” Rachael says. “She was in London in school in the 1960s where people would give her leaves and say ‘you can wipe your bum [on these] because you're from the jungle’.
“Growing up like that was really hard. That proximity to whiteness, to hold on to that, and just to be perceived as white just makes her life easier. She votes Conservative now. She’s quite light-skinned so she gets away with it.”
This is the problem with the legacy of empire and how the “immigrant” experience is portrayed by the media. Racism ran so deep in colonial times that it made mine and Rachael’s ancestors believe they were so inferior that they not only normalised prejudice but tried to be white and make their children white.
It’s what Salman Rushdie, in Imaginary Homelands, means when he laments “if only the ideas of the past didn’t rot down into the earth and fertilize the present”.
After the interview I tell Rachael this story about my father who had come to watch me play competitive football when I was about 10 years old in Dunstable. It was winter so I wasn’t as brown skinned as in the height of summer and my Dad must have noticed this. At half time he said “the best thing was if someone was walking past they would think you were white”. I had a terrible second half and was shouted at by the manager for not trying.
Whenever I read people of colour interviewed in the Guardian’s G2 section they talk about their resilience to racism fostered by parents directly challenging racists or at the very least explaining why prejudice exists. It doesn’t help that so many of the interviewers (and all the commissioning editors) are white. That’s why this interview was special and that’s why Rachael and I were able to bond over our lack of a clearly defined racial identity which I would argue is an important identity itself.
Rachael went to a large school in Chippenham on the “Andybus” every day where she was one of three Asian girls in her year. One of the other Brown schoolgirls called Raj, who would have been aged 14 at the time, held a very 90s-style party that caught the imagination of her white counterparts.
Now, every Brown person who grew up in a white enclave has a signature story about racism and I find Rachael’s hard to beat. In fact, If there were a racism Top Trumps this one would be scored 100 for all five categories — prejudice, misguidedness, offensiveness, appropriation, maliciousness — as it must have got the green-light from at least one adult.
“This was when Ali G was on The 11 O'Clock Show,” she says. “And for her birthday she had a Wigga party. She wanted to try to be perceived to be one of the white kids even though she obviously wasn't white. For an Asian woman to do it ... is so deeply offensive and anti-Black. I find it staggering. It’s classic market town.”
The racism Racheal experienced on a day-to-day basis was less in your face than you would imagine but equally as staggering and she admits she “stuck out like a sore thumb”. It was “gaslighty”, she says.
“People were really racist, but they will tell you that they're not being racist at the same time. So you're imagining it's not racism, but at the same time, they're still being racist. You're just an other. You're just Brown. You're just weird.
“Especially because I didn't want to bend towards whiteness, which when you're mixed race, people can gravitate towards it.”
Rachael started to learn DJing in her early twenties when she was living in Bath. She presumed that moving to London in 2008 when she was aged 24 would mean that she would have more opportunities to make a career out of it but she found herself stymied.
“At the moment,” she says. “We have these DJ collectives and workshops and this really amazing environment where when you're starting out, it's really easy to get gigs and network. There just wasn't that supportive environment then. So I stopped for years and didn't start again until 2012 or 2013.”
Alongside DJing, Rachael has worked as a booker for a slew of nightclubs, including Five Miles, The Alibi, gay venue Dalston Superstore before ending up at Rye Wax in Peckham. She’s one of the few people of colour who do this job in the country and her experience means she’s able to speak openly about racism and misogyny experienced in the booth and behind the scenes.
“As a mixed race woman of colour in nightlife,” she says. “Racism and misogyny is so intertwined, how do I even untangle it? What’s the motivation behind some people's actions? Is it misogyny? Or is it racism? And it’s the same gaslighty thing that I had at school.
“People will say ‘I think you just misunderstood me or I didn't mean it like that.’ Or ‘it's just a bit of a joke’. I get a lot of cishet white men telling me how to do my job [as a booker] and I’m like ‘babe, I’ve been doing this when you were in Year Seven.’”
Music, like journalism but unlike porn, I think, tends to favour people from wealthy backgrounds so it’s no surprise that the patronising treatment Rachael receives is from white ‘men’ who have their family’s capital behind them. But Rachael has stuck with working in clubs because she loves the job and has a stubborn streak to her personality. It might not love her back, though.
“The stuff that happens when I DJ,” she says.“Is a lot weirder and a lot worse. People will come into the booth and they'll touch buttons on the mixer, which is absolutely outrageous.
“They just think they know more than you. People touching your mixer is like being a journalist and someone coming into your room and deleting the words you’ve written. It’s incomprehensible that someone would do that so why does it happen in a club?”
OK, maybe journalism is different to music. And I guess something similar wouldn’t happen in porn. (I hope) So what’s the answer? And how does someone like Rachael stay sane?
“I'm really lucky,” she concludes. “The company I work for is a black-owned business. We have 75% managers of colour. We actually care about these things. And I'm in a working environment where the work I do is supported.
“The work I do tries to make nightlife safer, better and more diverse.”
Rachael advises other nightclubs about safety and she tells me a horrible story about a woman who was sexually harassed and then her trauma was compounded by having to witness the attacker being allowed back into the club. I can easily imagine events like this happening regularly, especially as the reaction to Sarah Everand’s murder showed that a lot of men are no where near ready to face up to society’s inconvenient truths.
When I write these kind of articles about race I usually try to end on an optimistic note about how the default of x profession may change in the future. But with jobs like journalist (92% white in the UK) and DJ (24% female, 7.5% managers of colour in the music industry) the harsh economic reality means it favours those who are already wealthy and see it as a plaything.
So there is no simple answer as to how music can gain diversity because it's cash-strapped and the raw economics mean it will favour anyone who spends at the door or at the bar. It’s worth thinking about this question as we come out of lockdowns in a pandemic that saw mass protests against racism and many appear to view key workers in a new light.
Because those who keep us entertained in a safe environment during our nights out deserve to be protected and they should be able to work without being harassed or discriminated against. And I hope that hearing about Rachael’s life can dispel the notion that creative professions are glamorous places for women of colour.
The headline is a quote from 1998’s God Is A DJ by Faithless.
I’m looking after my son for a couple of weeks so I have to take a short break from the newsletter. It’s no hardship as he’s at the age where all he needs is a swing. With infections rising again, classrooms closing and uncertainty growing I’m really here for anyone struggling so reach out if you need someone to chat to on the phone. Stay safe
